Can someone tell me the meaning of the column 'C' contained in the output of the ps -ef command?

UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME COMMAND

I was once told that if the value was higher then 0 and the process showed to be in a state of sleep when running a top then the command had timed out and can be killed?!!

Thanks in advance

Found this here You should probably visit to see this text in context with the example given....

Cheers
ZB

man says .....


C
(-f, l, and -l flags) CPU utilization of process or thread, incremented each
time the system clock ticks and the process or thread is found to be running.
The value is decayed by the scheduler by dividing it by 2 once per second. For
the sched_other policy, CPU utilization is used in determining process
scheduling priority. Large values indicate a CPU intensive process and result
in lower process priority whereas small values indicate an I/O intensive
process and result in a more favorable priority.

Thanks BZ. Am I right in thinking that if the process has 254 in the C column and is in a state of sleep, that it is no longer running but in a continual loop or a process it's relying on has died?

Thanks again

bhargav - out of interest which *nix are you using? The HP-UX 10.20 and SUSE 8.2 man pages have nothing on this....

Cheers
ZB

$ uname -a | cut -d" " -f 1,3-
AIX 3 4 000936434C00

You can't all of that stuff from the value 254. If it's in a state a sleep, it recently arrived at a state of sleep and the C value should continue to decay all the way to zero. "no longer running but in a continual loop" is not even self-consistant. A process that is in a loop would be running. You can't tell if the process is relying on another process from this number.